The swim
I have always loved the water. Show me a puddle and I want to stand in it, a pool and I want to jump in it, and a sea I want to become part of it. I’m not a bad swimmer either, it takes a lot for me to say that as I’ve always thought of myself as bad at most things, particularly sport, but I can thrash along quite happily these days for a while.
I have always been afraid of deep water. The blackness. The unknown. The reverse vertigo of seeing land 10 metres below you but finding yourself miraculously suspended above it simply waiting for the drop. Wondering what is watching you from beneath or if my skill and buoyancy will suddenly desert me and I’ll find myself leaving behind the light and warmth of the surface and sinking down into the darkness, never to return to the surface.
So I would stay close to shore. I would avoid rivers and lakes, where death would lurk waiting for an opportunity to grab an overly confident girl, then woman who really should know better than to listen to the call of the deep.
Because it does call.
The water. The depths. The unknown.
It has always called me. Sang to me. Whispered my name in the waves and the ripples. Daring me to move.
To be risk averse is seen as a good thing. The sensible thing. The right thing. But is it the human thing? Don’t we all feel more alive when we embrace the wildness, when we surrender to the unknown, when we are able to shout to the world,
“Come on and have your way with me! You can’t scare me.”
She said, hands trembling, voice shaking, knees a-knocking.
The truth is I’m scared a lot of the time, and I used to think that was bad. But now I think that being scared is a super power. It gives me the chance to be brave.
So I started going out of my depth. I answered the call and I swam out. I pushed away the thoughts of monsters and darkness and drowning and I swam. And I did it again. And again. And again.
I’m not reckless. I swim within myself. It just turns out that within myself is immeasurably more than I thought. The depths sang to me because there are depths in me. I need the depths to live. To be free.
It’s the feeling you get when you climb a mountain, or run with the rain in your face. It’s the feeling you get when you go for a job that scares you or when you open your mouth and speak the truth. It’s the feeling you get when you hold someone against your chest as their tears soak through your clothes or when you tell someone that you love them.
We need that feeling more. Cutting through the surface of the black, cold water like scissors through silk. Intensely vulnerable. Undeniably human. Utterly alive.
Mary Oliver says it better than me,
“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down into the grass
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
I’m going to swim.
internalkindness 